{"id":13583,"date":"2018-09-29T00:16:50","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T16:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/bezos-rocket-engine-selected-for-new-vulcan-rocket\/"},"modified":"2018-09-29T00:16:50","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T16:16:50","slug":"bezos-rocket-engine-selected-for-new-vulcan-rocket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/bezos-rocket-engine-selected-for-new-vulcan-rocket\/","title":{"rendered":"Bezos rocket engine selected for new Vulcan rocket"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket. Credit: ULA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ending months of speculation, Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, has won a milestone contract to provide first-stage rocket engines for a powerful new booster being designed by United Launch Alliance to replace its current fleet of Atlas and Delta launchers, the companies announced Thursday.<\/p>\n

Powered by liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, Blue Origin\u2019s BE-4 engine was selected over Aerojet Rocketdyne\u2019s more traditional kerosene-burning AR1 for use in ULA\u2019s new Vulcan rocket, expected to make its first flight in the mid-2020 timeframe.<\/p>\n

\u201cBig win for @BlueOrigin today!\u201d Bezos tweeted. \u201cAnd a big thank you to @ulalaunch for choosing our BE-4 engine. Excited to be a part of Vulcan\u2019s mission to space.\u201d<\/p>\n

The BE-4 engine will eventually end ULA\u2019s reliance on Russian-built RD-180 first-stage engines currently powering the first stage of the company\u2019s workhorse Atlas 5. RD-180s burn kerosene and oxygen and develop 860,000 pounds of thrust at sea level.<\/p>\n

Two BE-4 engines, generating 550,000 pounds of thrust each, will power the Vulcan\u2019s first stage, along with strap-on solid-fuel boosters provided by Northrup Grumman as required by payload weight and trajectory. Maximum liftoff thrust will be 3.8 million pounds and the rocket will be partially reusable.<\/p>\n

Aerojet Rocketdyne hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines will power the Vulcan\u2019s second stage when the initial version begins operations. A more powerful upper stage, the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES, will be phased in later.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Vulcan rocket will feature two BE-4 first stage engines, RL10 engines on the Centaur upper stage, and solid rocket boosters. Credit: ULA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ULA plans to continue launching Atlas 5s well into the early 2020s while the Vulcan transition proceeds. The Atlas 5 will be used as planned to launch Boeing\u2019s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew capsule to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are pleased to enter into this partnership with Blue Origin and look forward to a successful first flight of our next-generation launch vehicle,\u201d ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith added: \u201cUnited Launch Alliance is the premier launch service provider for national security missions, and we\u2019re thrilled to be part of their team and that mission. We can\u2019t thank Tory Bruno and the entire United Launch Alliance team enough for entrusting our engine to powering the Vulcan rocket\u2019s first stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

United Launch Alliance is a partnership between Boeing, original builder of the Delta family of rockets, and Lockheed Martin, developer of the Atlas 5, that was formed primarily to provide assured access to space for high-priority national security payloads<\/p>\n

Blue Origin also plans to use the BE-4 in the first stage of its New Glenn rocket, which will compete with both SpaceX and ULA launchers when it debuts in the early to mid 2020s. The New Glenn first stage is designed to land vertically for refurbishment and reuse.<\/p>\n

A two-stage version of the New Glenn booster will stand some 27 stories tall and will generate 3.85 million pounds of thrust at liftoff using seven BE-4 engines. The second stage will be powered by two BE-3 engines.<\/p>\n

The BE-3 already is in use with Blue Origin\u2019s sub-orbital New Shepard rocket, designed to carry tourists, researchers and small payloads to the edge of space and back from a launch site in Texas.<\/p>\n

The company has built a huge manufacturing facility near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to assemble New Glenn rockets, which will be launched from nearby Cape Canaveral. Bezos has said he is spending roughly $1 billion a year on his space ventures.<\/p>\n

Bezos and Bruno announced an initial agreement to develop BE-4 engines for ULA rockets in September 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s pretty clear it\u2019s time for a 21st century booster engine,\u201d Bezos said at the time. \u201cThe great engines of the past were truly remarkable machines in their own right \u2026 but we have tools and capabilities, software simulations, computational horsepower that the builders of those great engines could have only dreamed about.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can build an engine today that is a 21st century engine that has great reliability, low cost of operations and high performance,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re super excited about that, and we couldn\u2019t be more excited to have a partner like ULA.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Aerojet Rocketdyne threw its hat into the ring with plans to develop the AR1, generating 500,000 pounds of thrust, and it soon became clear Blue Origin no longer had a lock on the engine selection. That fueled intense speculation across the space industry about how the competition might play out.<\/p>\n

In any case, the selection of Blue Origin\u2019s BE-4 means ULA will be relying on an eventual competitor to provide the engines needed for its next-generation rocket. Contract details were not revealed, but it presumably includes delivery guarantees that meet ULA\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a great day for the Blue Origin team!\u201d the company tweeted late Thursday. \u201cWe are honored @ulalaunch has selected Blue\u2019s LOX\/LNG BE-4 engine to power the Vulcan rocket\u2019s first stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

ULA\u2019s decision to replace its Delta and Atlas rockets with a single system came in the wake of widely publicized complaints from SpaceX founder Elon Musk that criticized the use of the Russian-built RD-180 to launch U.S. national security payloads and what he viewed as a ULA military launch monopoly.<\/p>\n

Musk also criticized the high cost of the heavy-lift Delta 4, which uses Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68 first stage engines and is currently the most powerful fully operational rocket in the U.S. inventory. It also is the most expensive and is used exclusively for national security and NASA payloads.<\/p>\n

Musk eventually won the right to bid on high-value military payloads and since then, competition between SpaceX and ULA has been fierce, with ULA trimming costs and arguing its unblemished launch record, presumably lower insurance rates and schedule reliability make up for a higher price tag for the Atlas 5 compared to SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9.<\/p>\n

But Falcon 9s cost tens of millions less than the Atlas 5, an obvious selling point in the commercial launch industry. The eventual cost of the Vulcan is not yet known.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom low Earth orbit to Pluto, the single-core Vulcan Centaur does it all,\u201d ULA says on its website. \u201cThis simple design is more cost-efficient for all customers, whether defense and national security, NASA science and human spaceflight, or commercial.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s concept of United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket. Credit: ULA Ending months of speculation, Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, has won a milestone contract to provide first-stage rocket engines for a powerful new booster being designed by United Launch Alliance to replace its current fleet of Atlas and Delta launchers, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[864,2466,1211,509,1046,25,750,364],"class_list":["post-13583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-aerojet-rocketdyne","tag-ar1","tag-be-4","tag-blue-origin","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-launch","tag-united-launch-alliance","tag-vulcan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}